You are listening to the DFJ Entrepreneurial Thought Leaders series, brought you weekly by the Stanford Technology Ventures Program.

You can find podcasts and videos of these lectures online at eChorner.standford.edu.

It's a real pleasure to be introducing Ayusti here and the co-founders.

Just briefly, I'm going to give you the titles of the gentlemen sitting to my right here.

This is Gunner Carlson, who is also a professor here at Stanford.

He holds the Anne and Bill Swindell professorship in the School of Humanities and Sciences.

And this is also Gerjeet Singh, who is the CEO of Ayosti.

To tell you a quick story about Ayosti, I Gertjit back in 2010 and 2009. And he had a friend of ours,

a mutual friend of ours had sent me four math papers that Gertjit had written,

asking, you know, is there a business here? And I just started off my career as a venture capitalist

at this point, and I was also simultaneously trying to finish my PhD. And so I was in this mode of

reading papers and started going through Gerjeet's papers and realized that there were some really

interesting insights that he had, and I felt like there was a business there.

I then met with Gertit and became further enamored with the business and with him as a founder of a business,

and then went on to meet Gunner. And at that moment, I just felt like this was the business that I had to invest in, that no one else was allowed to be a part of this business at the seed stage.

And so I managed to chase Gertjeet down to a classroom at Stanford and then offered him a check for a million dollars.

And he was disciplined enough to say no,

because he didn't really know what he was going to do

with the money that I would give him.

And we proceeded to work together for a little while.

He would do some customer development, come back back and make me even more tantalized

with the business. And eventually, I wore him down to the point where he would take an investment

...